Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models

Shehzaad Dhuliawala, Mojtaba Komeili, Jing Xu, Roberta Raileanu, Xian Li, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason E Weston

Keywords: Large Language Model, Hallucination

TL;DR: We propose Chain-of-Verification, a method that allows the LLM to deliberate over and self-verify its output. We show that our approach reduces hallucinations over different generation tasks

Abstract: Generation of plausible yet incorrect factual information, termed hallucination, is an unsolved issue in large language models. We study the ability of language models to deliberate on the responses they give in order to correct their mistakes. We develop the Chain-of-Verification (CoVe) method whereby the model first (i) drafts an initial response; then (ii) plans verification questions to fact-check its draft; (iii) answers those questions independently so the answers are not biased by other responses; and (iv) generates its final verified response. In experiments, we show CoVe decreases hallucinations across a variety of tasks, from list-based questions from Wikidata, closed book MultiSpanQA and longform text generation.

Submission Number: 21